Barbara J. Hamby

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Home Again--Safe and Well

I left home for the hinterlands determined to stay well. I packed a lotta pills with me, including Airborne, a new product I hadn’t tried before and Pepto Bismol tablets. Either they, or my good intentions, kept me from feeling ill. I was often tired and achy and had minor stomach upsets, but nothing major. We saw far away places with strange sounding names, such as Vladivostok. We had some good times and some not-so-good ones. Those stories will be showing up on the travel page of my blog soon.

Getting home uninjured from Japan and China was not easy. Al says there are two kinds of pedestrians over there--the quick and the dead. We were motivated to be quite quick, in spite of our age and size. A last minute illustration of how bad the driving is was the wreck in the exit lane to the airport in Beijing. Our bus driver (most of our bus drivers were excellent) had to get out and confer with a police officer and then get back on the freeway and take the exit for airport arrivals, which meant we were on the wrong floor that had no facilities for incoming luggage. Our guide ran inside and brought out all the carts he could manage. We arrived at the airport before 7:00 a.m. yesterday (which was the 31st there) and barely made our plane that left shortly after 9:00 for Tokyo where we changed planes to go on to Portland.

We returned to find a Sold sign out front, so apparently the deal is progressing. I’ll check with the realtor tomorrow to see where it stands. We also need to check with King City Apartments, where we applied for residence before we left. For those who might not be familiar with King City, it was established more than forty years ago as a retirement residence for the over-55 crowd. They have homes and condos for sale and apartments for rent. We decided on a low-responsibility apartment. My favorite “perk” of residing there is the year-around indoor swimming pool.

Apparently a rumor started while we were gone that we had already moved out and our very elderly neighbor across the street was really upset that we didn’t let her know. She was out of town when we left on the trip. I had told her we’d be going, but she must have forgotten.

It certainly is good to be home. Our yard is a jungle of blooms. Many pretty flowers and many more weeds. I was afraid the iris would have finished blooming when we returned, but they are in all their glory right now.

Beijing had many gorgeous flowers. The most unusual sight was hundreds, or maybe thousands of rose bushes blooming profusely on both sides of a freeway. They were in all colors and looked very healthy considering where they were growing.

I’m going to try to stay up late enough to get back into usual sleeping hours. Tomorrow I’ll start transferring travel logs from the laptop computer and editing them.

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